The Mainstream: Intel 815 Series Motherboards

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The 815 chipset has supplanted the now-defunct 440BX chipset as the workhorse of Intel’s chipset line. The 815E and 815EP are each two-chip solutions. The 82815 MCH (memory controller hub) acts as the interface between the CPU and memory, and connects to the second chip in the chipset called the 82901BA ICH2 (I/O controller hub). The ICH2 houses connections to the PCI bus, IDE hard drives, floppy controller, AC97 audio and Ethernet.

The two hubs are connected via a 66MHz hub link; this 66MHz signal is quad-sampled, resulting in peak data transfer rates between the two hubs of 266MB/second. Note that audio and LAN functionality are really software driven, so expect to use some processor cycles if you go with pure ICH2 solutions.

The key difference between the 815E and the 815EP is the absence of Intel’s 752 graphics core in the EP version. However, both variants of the 815 support a discrete AGP slot. When a card is inserted into the AGP slot, the integrated graphics of the 815E are automatically disabled. The 815E series is not capable of supporting fastwrites, one of the advanced features of AGP 2.0. In most cases, this makes little difference, but no fastwrites support makes the chipset ill suited for some high-polygon count 3D content creation applications.

The 815E series supports the standard 66, 100 and 133MHz frontside bus speeds by default, though some motherboard manufacturers allow for alternative FSB speeds. That makes it well suited for all Intel flip-chip (FPGA) Pentium III class CPUs, including the Celeron. However, the 815 chipset will not support the upcoming Tualitin-class Pentium III CPUs, which will be built on a 0.13 micron semiconductor process. While it’s possible that the current 0.18 micron products will extend as high as 1.13GHz, the current 815 really doesn’t have much room for growth. On the other hand, 815 motherboards are relatively inexpensive, so you can start with a modest budget and move up later. After all, a 1GHz Pentium III is a fairly beefy processor for most applications, as we’ll see. Intel is prepping an update to the 815 for the Tualitin.

815 MotherboardsWe looked at four motherboards using the 815E or EP chipset. What’s interesting about this set of motherboards is the similarity in performance in application-oriented benchmarking. We’ll discuss the results and their implications at the end of this article. For now, let’s dive into the reviews and take a closer look.

Aopen AX3S Pro

Aopen sells a wide variety of boards, peripherals, and systems in the “white box” market. Recently though, they’ve radically improved both the packaging and documentation of retail motherboards.

The printed circuit board (PCB) layout is relatively clean, and there were no visible patches or wire jumpers. However, there’s only five PCI slots (and one CNR riser card slot). In addition, there are some problems with the motherboard’s layout. For example, the two IDE ports are directly behind the first PCI slot and just to one side of the AGP slot.

This made insertion of the GeForce2 Ultra board a tad awkward, though not difficult. If you have a longer PCI board, such as certain video capture cards, you can’t use the first PCI slot. This isn’t terrible, as the heat generated by today’s video cards precludes putting another hot card next to the AGP slot. It’s unlikely that the AX3S Pro will be used for workstation-class applications, which also downgrades the importance of the first slot.

We ran our benchmark scores using a single 256MB Mushkin rev 2 module, using the “auto” selection for CAS latency. The benchmarks were pretty much on par with those of the other 815 boards (with the exception of the Asus, which we’ll discuss shortly). All of the 815 boards were fairly close in most of the tests.

For those people who like to tweak their systems, the AX3S Pro supports FSB clocks up to 166MHz and has a fairly extensive array of memory tweak options. We didn’t test the overclocking capability, as it likely varies from board to board.

Onboard audio consists only of the ICH2 audio coupled to an Analog Devices AD1885 codec. Aopen supplies Analog Device’s SoundMax 2.0 software for software-driven, dynamic 3D audio modeling. The company thoughtfully supplies the extra USB connector, which allows you to have four total.

Aopen’s documentation is more user-friendly than most, and is quite extensive. Because of this, and the board’s overall stability (we experienced no stability problems with the AX3S Pro in all the test applications), this might be a good board for someone dipping their toes in the homebrew PC pond for the first time. Despite the minor layout problems, this is a solid board with a full feature set.

AX3S ProPrice: $105-$115Pros: Stable, good set of tweak and overclocking optionsCons: Layout a bit awkwardRating: 7/10www.aopen.com

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